Wings
Authors: E. D. Baker
A FAIRY TALE
E. D. BAKER
This book is dedicated to Ellie for being my sounding board and
my first reader through all the versions I’ve written over the last
three years, to Victoria for believing in me and for her clarity of
vision, and to Kim and Andy for helping around the house
while my mind was in another world
.
Tamisin Warner first saw real goblins the Halloween she was eleven. She had gone trick-or-treating with her mother, her little brother, Petey, and her best friend, Heather. The evening had begun ordinarily enough, but it didn’t stay that way for long.
“I can’t believe my mother made me wear this stupid costume,” Heather had complained as one of her paper leaves fluttered to the ground. After rearranging the trash bag so her neck was centered in the hole, she frowned and tried to smooth another loose leaf. “Who ever heard of dressing up as Autumn for Halloween? I wish I had a costume like yours. I’ve never seen such a pretty fairy princess costume before.”
Tamisin glanced down at the blue petal dress her mother had helped her make. Even with all the sewing, the dress had taken less time than the silvery wings, which drooped no matter what Tamisin did with pins and duct tape. “Thanks. I tried to make it look real.”
The girls started toward the next house while Petey
and his mother trailed behind. “It’s getting dark,” said Heather, hitching up one side of her trash bag to reach into her jacket pocket. Pulling out a slim flashlight, she aimed the beam at the porch, letting the light rest on the carved pumpkins and bundled cornstalks by the door.
“We can’t go there,” said Tamisin, aiming her own flashlight at the front of the house. “They don’t have their lights on. It looks like nobody’s home.”
“I’ll race you to the blue house then!” Heather announced as she took off down the street.
Tamisin was following her friend when something moved in the beam of her flashlight. She paused in the front yard of the empty house, letting the light play across the space between the two houses. There it was—a small figure no bigger than Petey emptying a trash can onto the lawn. When it laughed, it sounded like a child, but its body was more like an animal’s with a hunched back, a long, puffy tail, and legs that bent the wrong way. The creature was laughing when it reached into the garbage and flung banana peels and eggshells over its shoulder. It was laughing when it climbed into the trash can and rolled across the yard until it banged into a tree. It was still laughing when it crawled out of the can shedding coffee grounds and scraps of greasy paper towels. But when it stood up and turned around only to have Tamisin’s light fall full on its masked face, the little creature shrieked like a siren and flung its furred hands into the air, its mouth wide open in surprise.
And then it was gone, leaving Tamisin unable to believe what she had seen.
“Are you coming or what?” Heather called from the front steps of the blue house.
“Did you see … No, I guess you wouldn’t … Yeah, I’ll be right there,” Tamisin answered, torn between going after the little creature to see if it was real and joining her friend.
They visited a few more houses before meeting up with Tamisin’s mother and Petey across from the school. While her mother tried to persuade Petey to wait to eat his candy, Tamisin watched the passing trick-or-treaters. Children dressed as superheros, pirates, and ghosts ran from house to house, leaving their parents standing on the sidewalk. She heard her older brother Kyle’s voice when he ran by with two of his friends, but he pretended that he didn’t know her. All three of the boys were dressed as aliens with rubbery masks and blue coveralls. A child dressed as a fire hydrant and another dressed as a candy bar hurried past with a little girl in a pink dress following only a few feet behind. Tamisin caught a glimpse of her face, which looked much older than her size suggested. Even stranger were her little twitchy nose and mouselike ears.
“Did you see the girl with the mouse nose?” Tamisin whispered to Heather. “Did you see the way it moved? It had to be real!”
Heather laughed. “You’re so funny, Tamisin!”
Tamisin sighed. She should have known not to try to tell Heather what she had seen. Heather had been her best friend since kindergarten. She was someone Tamisin could tell the really important things to, like when she
got a bad grade on a test or how she felt about having a baby brother, but there were certain things Heather didn’t understand.
A group of children passed them on the sidewalk. Tamisin and Heather hurried after them, while Petey and her mother tried to keep up. One of the boys in the group was dressed as a cowboy with a ten-gallon hat and boots that looked two sizes too big. He was clomping along, talking excitedly with his friends, when an impossibly long arm reached out from under a car and tripped him. His friends immediately gathered around, teasing him about his oversized shoes. No one except Tamisin seemed to have noticed the arm and the six-fingered hand that grabbed some of the candy that had spilled from the boy’s plastic pumpkin when he dropped it. Only Tamisin seemed to hear a deep voice laughing under the car as the boy scowled and got back on his feet.
“Watch your step, kids,” said Tamisin’s mother. “The sidewalk is uneven.”
Tamisin was wary now; creatures that no one else could see were playing pranks on people. If she hadn’t seen the arm trip the boy, she might think that she’d imagined it, but it had suddenly become more real. Although she’d been trick-or-treating on Halloween for as long as she could remember, she’d never seen anything like this before.
With Heather at her side, Tamisin climbed the steps to the next house. Neither the smiling face of the woman at the door nor the piece of candy dropped in Tamisin’s bag made any impression on her. There were things in
the dark, things that she’d never seen before, except … maybe she had. The creature with the legs that bent the wrong way, the long skinny arm that looked more like a hose than the limb of a body … Both reminded her of creatures she’d seen in a nightmare—
the
nightmare—the one she’d had for as long as she could remember. It was enough to wake her up at night. It was enough to make her afraid to step off the porch.
She was about to tell Heather that she wanted to go home when Petey shrieked and began to cry. Tamisin felt safer inside the crowd, but if her little brother needed her … Moving against the current of children, the girls found Petey seated on the ground, his chubby legs splayed out in front of him. He was hiccupping around the two fingers crammed in his mouth, his face tear-streaked and flushed. Their mother was kneeling beside him, inspecting his bloodied knee. Glancing up at the girls, she said, “He’ll be fine. He tripped on the sidewalk. I knew it was uneven, but he insisted on walking.”
Alarmed, Tamisin looked up in time to see something shiny glint in the shrubs, then suddenly disappear. The sound of voices made her turn. A group of children stood under the street lamp on the opposite corner. She would have given them no more than a quick glance if she hadn’t been struck by the costume that the tallest child was wearing. He looked like a lion with a furry ruff around his head and what looked like fur on his face, but after a moment’s study, she began to wonder if it was a costume at all. And as for the rest of the children—the longer she looked, the less they looked like children. One
had droopy ears that dangled below his collar. The boy standing beside him had small rounded ears on top of his head. A third had teeth that curled over her lower lip when she closed her mouth. There were others with too many joints in their arms or a sheen to their skins that made Tamisin think of scales.
A skinny almost-boy with a pointed face and dark, tiny eyes like a rodent seemed to be in charge. His movements were quick and furtive as he took eggs and rolls of toilet paper from an enormous sack and passed them to the others. When those ran out, he gave them buckets into which he poured liquid, gloppy mud.
Heather had crouched down beside Petey and was trying to distract him with the candy in her bag. “What are you looking at?” she asked when Tamisin didn’t join her.
“Nothing,” said Tamisin, not wanting to be laughed at again.
The rodent boy looked up at the sound of her voice. His eyes met Tamisin’s in an unblinking gaze that made her heart start to pound and her mouth go dry. Turning his head to the side, the rodent boy said something to his friends. In an instant they all stopped what they were doing to stare at Tamisin. They didn’t look at her the way ordinary children did, as if seeing what she looked like or what she was wearing; they looked at her the way a cat might a mouse or a fox a hen in an appraising, “I’m hungry” sort of way. If she’d been frightened before, Tamisin was terrified now.
While her mother fussed over Petey, Tamisin backed away one slow step at a time. The eyes of the not-quite-children
stayed on her even when Petey whined and fretted. “Run!” her mind shouted, yet she couldn’t just abandon her family. As she moved farther away and the strange children didn’t look at anyone but her, Tamisin realized that her family wasn’t in danger. She was.